AFP® GUIDE TO

How FP&A Can Develop

Effective Presentations
FP&A Guide Series
Underwritten by

Issue 15
Dear AFP Members & Finance Professionals,

Workiva is pleased to partner with AFP to present this guide, “How FP&A can
Develop Effective Presentations”.

In the following pages, you will learn from other FP&A professionals about the
importance of establishing business partnerships, leveraging technology for the creation
and consumption of presentations, and methods for effective presentation delivery.

At Workiva, we understand the challenges associated with gathering, consolidating,

and reporting data. We work to solve that pain by providing Wdesk, a cloud platform
that streamlines the reporting process, giving you the time you need to analyze data
and create presentations with confidence.

FP&A professionals have an opportunity to increase their value to the organization by

providing insights with supporting data. We hope this guide helps you and your team
to develop better presentations, reflecting that increased value.

Sincerely,

The Workiva Team

AFP® GUIDE TO
How FP&A Can Develop
Effective Presentations
FP&A Guide Series
Underwritten by

Contents

Operational Performance Reviews 1
Speaking the language 1
Communication through partnership and focused resources 2
Delivering insight with the data 3
Executive Reviews 4
Leading with insight, supporting with the data 4
Having executive presence 5
Leveraging partnerships 5
Presentation Delivery 6
Leveraging technology 7
Delivering bad news 7
Communication Matters 8
Key Takeaways 8
 “As we get into conversations with our business partners and
increasingly with executive management, we want to know
how to be effective. How do we deliver value? It’s not simply
handing out printouts of Excel spreadsheets. How can we
deliver insight that’s meaningful and build those partnerships
throughout the organization?”

Introduction
How do you deliver a presentation to your peers? How about to the CEO?
Those two presentations likely will differ a great deal. And if they don’t?
You’re either doing something really right or—more likely—doing something
very wrong.
Presentations are a key cog in your department’s overall communication
plan—and the most important part of communication is to make sure that
your audience “gets” your message. That means considering your audience,
the situation, their goals, and your goals.
In this latest guide, underwritten by Workiva, we will explore tactics that
FP&A professionals can use for delivering effective presentations, both to
business units and to upper management and the board of directors.
“As we get into conversations with our business partners and increasingly
with executive management, we want to know how to be effective,” said
Bryan Lapidus, FP&A, CFO Advisory for Allegiance Advisory Group and a
contributing consultant for AFP. “How do we deliver value? It’s not simply
handing out printouts of Excel spreadsheets. How can we deliver insight
that’s meaningful and build those partnerships throughout the organization?”
This guide contains three sections that will support the FP&A professional
in effective communications: first, an examination of periodic performance
reviews; second, excellence in executive reviews; and third, ways to improve
effectiveness in preparing for both situations.
 AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Develop Effective Presentations
Operational Performance Reviews
Operational performance reviews with business units
play a big role in FP&A’s responsibility. In these periodic
meetings, financial and operating performance is reviewed
against the plan, budget, prior forecast or prior year, while
future plans are also explored. The frequency of these
reviews varies from organization to organization, though
monthly is fairly standard. These reviews are an opportunity
for FP&A to build relationships with its peers on the other
side of the table.
“You may be the best analyst in the world
and you may have conducted a phenomenal
analysis on whatever was given to you, but
it’s not going to be effective if you’re not
able to communicate it in a language that’s
understandable to your audience.”
Speaking the language
As with any presentation, FP&A must keep its audience—
business units—in mind and speak in their language while
delivering the details. Much of the terminology that FP&A
uses internally may fly over the heads of many of their
counterparts in other functions. Additionally, FP&A must
www.AFPonline.org ©2017 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved 1
make the effort to keep things interesting in these presenta-
tions in order to maintain attention and attendance.
“You may be the best analyst in the world and you may
have conducted a phenomenal analysis on whatever was
given to you, but it’s not going to be effective if you’re not
able to communicate it in a language that’s understandable
to your audience,” said Tarun Chopra, senior vice president
and CFO of Clements Worldwide. “So you really need to
make sure that you simplify it for your audience.”
Renee Garin, CTP, FP&A, manager of investments,
pensions and finance for Talen Energy and chair of the
AFP Emerging Leaders Task Force, noted that commu-
nication is a major roadblock to any presentation, and
it needs to be overcome so that FP&A and the business
units can get on that same page. She has found that some-
thing as simple as requesting data can trip up the teams.
“Typically, you first need some sort of information from
them in order to start pulling it together, and what you’ll
find very quickly is that what you’re asking for is not fully
understood or not interpreted in the same way as your end
goal,” she said.
For Emmanuel Caprais, vice president of strategic and
financial planning for ITT, getting everyone on the same
page is also a multi-step process that begins well in ad-
vance of the monthly meetings themselves. First, he frames
the meeting in business terms. About four days after the
end of each month, he releases a memo highlighting that
month’s results. Since ITT is a product-driven business,
these results typically contain information on orders and
revenue. “Topline is very important for us, so we deliver
details on orders and revenue, and we compare it to prior-
year forecasts and budgets,” he said. “We also look at our
backlog and when it will convert into sales.”
In these memos, FP&A breaks down those orders
between the different product lines, as well as by end-
markets and regions. “We also break it down in terms of
orders we lost and what has been delayed in terms of timing,”
Caprais continued. “This is really important for us to un-
derstand our performance, and we can try to isolate what
is due to the market, and what is due to our ability to win
more orders.”
Next, Caprais frames ITT’s performance in terms of
profit and loss (P&L), which requires substantial time to
explaining how the business units should read the P&L.
“Because we want to take advantage of every incremental
dollar of revenue we get, we recently changed the structure
AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Develop Effective Presentations
of our P&L, looking at variable and fixed costs separately.
As a result, we have an organization that’s not yet very
knowledgeable about our financial statements,” he said.
He devotes time to educating his partners on the P&L
details by relating it to what they know. “So we talk about
the impacts on spending, absorption, productivity and
efficiencies, but we try to map it in a way for our people
that it makes sense and it’s not only numbers,” he said.
About a week after the memos go out, ITT’s FP&A
department performs a full-day review with the entire
staff. Caprais and his team help evaluate all of ITT’s
business units, reviewing in even more detail how they are
performing, their cost structure, and all the related financial
metrics. “We look also at the details of the major jobs
that we’ve won and those jobs that we’ve lost, and do a
post-mortem for the latter group,” he said. “We also do a
project review to understand the financial and operational
performance of our major projects being executed; we
win multimillion dollar orders, so these reviews make sure
every issue is being tackled in a timely fashion.”
“What is it that FP&A needs to
receive from the business in order
to be on top of the changes in
the forecast?
Communication through partnership and
focused resources
Any meeting with your business partners is an opportunity
to improve the partnership. The operational performance
review is a fixed time on everyone’s calendar to enhance
this relationship. The key to partnership is the give and
take of teamwork, where FP&A is able to get information
from the other departments while delivering information
to them.
“What is it that FP&A needs to receive from the business
in order to be on top of the changes in the forecast? At the
same time, what is it that the business needs to get from
FP&A in order to know about the future of the company
and the strategic business plans,” Lapidus asked.
2 ©2017 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved www.AFPonline.org
It’s a two-way street; Garin wants the other departments
to understand what she does, but she also wants to see
things from their point of view as well. “I try to make it
clear that I want to understand what they’re telling me,
and what they do at an adequate enough level that I can
ask intelligent questions of them,” she said. “I want to
come at them with my requests or my delivery in a way
that is meaningful to them. I make it clear that the project
that I’m undertaking is going to benefit them as well.”
Chopra also values the input that business units bring
to FP&A. Every month, he looks at the pipeline of activi-
ties and gauges what Clements aims to get out of each of
initiative. From there, FP&A will sit down with a business
unit and ask what they expect to get out of the money
they intend to spend. FP&A performs a 60- and 90-day
outlook, in which it evaluates the initiatives that are set
to take effect over each time period and then determines
whether the business units have everything they need to
put those initiatives into action.
“Do you have the marketing lined up? Do you have to
operations lined up, if you have a new product that’s set to
roll out? If it is a technology solution that needs some type
of development—is all of that lined up? What do
you need for it? That’s what we do on a monthly basis,”
Chopra said. Notice that these questions are very tactical
and process driven; to ask these questions requires
in-depth business knowledge.
FP&A professionals need to make sure that all of these
conversations are open, honest and not adversarial.
FP&A often faces some stigma from individuals in other
departments who see these periodic performance reviews
as little more than opportunities for FP&A to cut back on
their budgets. It’s up to FP&A practitioners to change
that perception.
“FP&A are often seen as bean counters who may shrink or
pull money back from the budget,” Lapidus said. “Everybody
should be aligned on strategy, operations and tactics, and un-
derstand that the role of FP&A and the business is to allocate
capital to its most effective use. These performance reviews are
an opportunity to check up on how we’re doing on that job,
and drive actions that drive the business.”
Caprais agreed: “I don’t push for cutting the budget;
that’s not the role of FP&A,” he said. “The role of FP&A,
I think, is to say what the situation is compared to our
goals and to decide with the business what the remedies to
that situation are.”
 AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Develop Effective Presentations
Changing FP&A’s reputation from cost control to
capital deployment is a cultural change that Robert
Muhr, director of financial planning for Talen Energy, has
dealt with. Talen started out as a utility, and back then, a
budget was defined as an allocation of money to be spent;
a department would spend all of it out of fear that they
wouldn’t get it next year.
After Talen transitioned from a regulated entity to a
more competitive market, the culture of the business
units holding their money close to the chest was still
entrenched throughout the company. So Muhr found
himself prompting people to think about the budget a
bit differently. “A lot of that became education, because
many of these guys don’t think that way from an analytical
perspective. You have to almost get them thinking how
you think about it,” he said. That culture change requires
close partnership and demonstrated value.
“Every time there is a slide deck,
for instance, we have three or
four clear takeaways. And we try
to really put financial numbers
into perspective to avoid being
too technical. What matters is
the message delivered and the
actions that will follow; the
numbers are just there to
support the case being made.”
Delivering insight with the data
Even before getting into operational review meetings,
FP&A must wade through an ocean of data to pull the
relevant bits. Then, in the meeting, the team faces the
challenge of presenting large amounts of information in
a way that businesses can absorb it without being over-
whelmed. To do this, FP&A should review the information
before the meeting and identify relevant, special topics
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that month based on unusual variances or surprises, a
“rotating spotlight” approach of having a different deep-
dive each period, or an internal directive. FP&A should
also solicit input from the business on what they want to
discuss. The final package may resemble a list of themes or
insights on top of a package of reports.
“For us, what’s really important is constant, targeted
and specific communication in order to make sure that we
are all working in the same direction,” Caprais said.
“Every time there is a slide deck, for instance, we have
three or four clear takeaways. And we try to really put
financial numbers into perspective to avoid being too
technical. What matters is the message delivered and the
actions that will follow; the numbers are just there to
support the case being made.” This applies to both the
operational performance meetings, which tends to have a
lot of data, and executive meetings.
Chopra also performs regular reviews with business
units in which he reviews the monthly financials and
converts them to the market-based actions where the
business thinks and operates. “You need to go beyond just
the standard process of, ‘Here’s your forecast and here are
your actuals,’” he said. “Where we add value is by giving
them analysis of the portfolio of products and services that
they’ve sold, and compare it to the plan. You say, ‘In the
previous month, this is what you sold, and here’s how it
affected your profit margins and your revenue topline.’”
For instance, from a pricing and product mix stand-
point, Chopra will look at what was in the plan and what
was actually sold. “So for the same product, was your
pricing higher on a per-case basis, or lower than you had
projected? Were you selling more of the high-end products
or the low-end? That goes more into the product mix
analysis. And then the cost is really the margins—if we
are selling more of the high-end than the low-end, it will
affect margins but deliver more gross dollars,” he said.
To help navigate the data, it is useful to develop a con-
sistent look and feel to your presentation, noted frequent
AFP conference speaker Randall Bolten in his book,
“Painting with Numbers.” Consistency allows for the
audience to know what data to expect, where to find
it, and how to read the information. The audience can
absorb the content faster because they can become accus-
tomed with your style of delivering it to them. This also
helps them gain confidence in the quality and accuracy of
the data you report.
AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Develop Effective Presentations
Executive Reviews
Presenting to finance chiefs, business presidents, chief
executives and boards of directors is another a key compo-
nent in FP&A’s regular routine. As FP&A’s role has grown
in prominence over the past decade, these interactions are
becoming more frequent, and all FP&A practitioners need
to understand the nuances that separate these exchanges
from those conducted with the businesses. “The executive
meeting is very different from the operational meeting,”
Lapidus said. “It really comes as an outgrowth of FP&A’s
success in understanding the business and adding value.”
Generally, these meetings are shorter than operational review
meetings and focused on a specific topic or decision.
FP&A is in a unique position in that it exists at the cross-
roads of finance and accounting, business and operations.
And as noted in the previous section of this guide, it must
be able to speak the language of both. This plays heavily into
how FP&A presents to its superiors. Again, consider your
audience and recognize that these meetings are different
environments than the operational performance reviews.
Leading with insight, supporting with the data
The common approach for non-routine meetings such as
research analysis or decision support is the issue-recom-
mendation approach. “When FP&A professionals get in
front of the executives, they need to be able to speak on
the business side, to deliver insight and be able to back that
up as necessary with whatever data is there,” Lapidus said.
“However, the presentation is very different. The presenta-
4 ©2017 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved www.AFPonline.org
tion to an executive generally is insight first, analysis second
and data third—hard-hitting, quick, to the point, and
presented in a way that shows that FP&A knows its business,
the language of business and the language of accounting, and
can put them together to deliver value and insight at that
point, and back it up with facts.”
When Chopra presents to executives, he begins by address-
ing the problem, and then immediately goes into the solution,
before presenting the analysis. “You need to be very clear in
the first few slides by showing your objective,” he said. “You
don’t want to go through the analysis first—you have to flip it
and say, ‘Here’s the problem we are trying to solve, here’s our
recommendation, and now let me tell you why.’”
Executives generally operate at the big-picture level and
think about strategic alignment, then will drill down. Muhr
mirrors this and tries to keep things at high level without
going into too many details right away. “I actually let them
draw me in to the details if they need to,” he said. “I’ve
found that works best, as opposed to just going right there,
because you can paint the broad picture and then get down
to the very specific questions.”
“The executive meeting is very different
from the operational meeting. It really
comes as an outgrowth of FP&A’s
success in understanding the business
and adding value.”
Muhr noted that, by delving into the details right off the
bat, management might zero in on something relatively
inconsequential and the point could ultimately be missed.
“But if you allow them to bring you down into those
details, you know you have their attention,” he said.
While this approach is the norm, the overriding rule is
to know your audience and the goals. As a contrary ex-
ample, Travis Lockhart, CTP, FP&A, finance manager for
CALIBRE Systems, has found that he is more successful
with his executive team using a storybook approach where
he leads the audience to his recommendation. By putting
the analysis first (or second) it keeps his audience engaged
and avoids questions that could derail the entire presenta-
tion. “We would get a million questions about risk and
compliance, particularly from the leadership team,” he said.
 AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Develop Effective Presentations
“[My leadership team] just goes really in-depth with these
types of things and it’s better to just lay out all the details so
that when you present the solution, they know that it fits.”
Having executive presence
When delivering a presentation to senior leadership, FP&A
professionals need to demonstrate executive presence.
According to a study of 268 senior executives by the
Center for Talent Innovation, executive presence is largely
considered to be one’s ability to display confidence,
composure under pressure and decisiveness. Communica-
tion and appearance play key roles; it is not uncommon to
rehearse one’s presentation, even recruiting someone to play
the role of an executive in the audience.
“You need to bring that information up
to the board and the senior leadership
team in a way that is meaningful to
them, without bogging them down in
all the details and whatnot.”
Many FP&A practitioners aspire to be CFO, and more
broadly, the FP&A function wants to feel like it truly
has a voice in the strategic role of the company, even if it
does not yet have a presence in the C-suite. For either to
happen, FP&A professionals must be able to speak to the
CEO and CFO.
Garin sees FP&A as senior leadership’s eyes into the busi-
ness. It’s the function’s job, then, to gather all the information
it can from the individual business lines and summarize that
at an executive level. “You need to bring that information up
to the board and the senior leadership team in a way that is
meaningful to them, without bogging them down in all the
details and whatnot,” she said. “I think that the way you gain
credibility with them—even though you’re not quite on their
level—is by being prepared. Know your materials, and know
the analysis that led to the results that you’re about to present
to them, because they’re going to ask you questions. So be
prepared to give good answers.”
This can be tricky because you probably will not be able
to answer every questions. As long as you can explain your
reasoning for the conclusions you’ve made and follow-up
on the questions you can’t answer, you should be fine. “You
www.AFPonline.org ©2017 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved 5
may need to say, ‘Here’s why I think this, and I’ll get
back to you,’” Garin said. “And then you need to make
good on those promises to get back to them. But if
you’re stumbling over any question that is asked and you
can’t support or adequately explain the results that you’re
providing at that upper level, you’re going to lose your
audience very quickly.”
Lapidus sees this as an opportunity to display execu-
tive presence. “Don’t shrink away if you don’t know an
answer; be direct and say that you will follow up after-
wards,” he said. “Don’t try to fake knowledge, fudge an
answer, or conjecture beyond what you know. And if you
say you will follow up, be sure to do so quickly.”
It is important to note that a presenter doesn’t have to
be overly formal to exude executive presence. It’s far more
important to be confident in the information you are
providing. Lockhart typically starts the meeting quickly and
then cuts to the chase. “Executive presence comes off in the
knowledge that I have or in the detail and the depth of what
I’m presenting,” he said. “If someone asks me a question
that is fairly technical in nature, I’m the expert on the analy-
sis that I’m providing. I’ve looked at it; I know the answer.
I can answer their question in more detail and with more
backup and visual support than they probably expected.”
Leveraging partnerships
When meeting with business executives, FP&A needs to be
able to enter the meeting and establish trust and expertise
in an area that the executive knows intimately. The way to
do that is by already having done the hard work of building
an effective partnership with the operating teams. Enacting
the best practices mentioned in operational reviews will pay
dividends in executive meetings.
There are specific actions that FP&A can take.
Developing effective communications in the opera-
tional review makes it easier to speak the language in
these meetings; you can use the data and metrics that
the business understands to deliver your insight to the
executive. The operational meetings are the time to
practice these skills, use their KPIs and metrics, and
relate them back to the general ledger and financial met-
rics. Consider the alternative: the meeting can bog down
into an explanation of what you are showing, where the
data came from, what the metrics mean, whether they
are calculated correctly—all that before you even get to
present your insight!
AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Develop Effective Presentations
Lockhart noted that other departments are often ac-
tive participants both preparing formal pricing review
presentations and delivering them. “While I am the main
content creator, I definitely partner with other business
units—primarily the division leading the effort as well as
contracts—to help validate what I’ve prepared and make
sure it’s the story we want to tell,” he said. “During the
presentation itself, it will generally be a combination effort
of myself and a divisional director or VP doing the major-
ity of the speaking.”
Working closely with other the business units helps
FP&A obtain critical data and insights to provide to your
superiors. “In most cases, it is a collaborative process where
I take input from other business units,” Chopra said. “It
helps on two levels. One, I get a different business perspec-
tive and second, it creates buy-in.”
But just as FP&A needs to be prepared to meet with se-
nior executives, so must business unit leaders. Caprais meets
with these individuals before the meeting, and does his best
to prepare them for any possible questions senior manage-
ment may ask. “I’ll point out inconsistencies and suggest
deeper dive analyses they need to do to ensure that they
have the right answer. I’ll also invite them to corroborate
their sometimes off-the-cuff statements with facts,” he said.
“The key for me is to get them to understand fully what’s
going on in their business in order for them to be success-
ful in front of senior management. But also, once their
presentation is done, I want them to go back and engage
more with local finance business partners and improve the
performance of their business.”
These interactions often vary, depending on which busi-
ness unit Caprais is working with at a given time. Some of
the exchanges consists of high-level guidance with seasoned
leaders. Others are more like coaching sessions, in which he
has to bring leaders up to speed on the financials and help
them understand the link to the business. “This approach
is usually beneficial as long as there is an open, honest
dialogue, which happens in most cases,”he said.
When partnering with business unit leaders during a
presentation, it is also important that they know they have
your support. Caprais makes this clear during performance
reviews. “If I see that a senior executive is not being fair or
is missing the point that a business unit leader is trying to
make, I always make the point to intervene and support the
leader,” he said. “It is not always easy but this has earned
me the respect of the business community, who know they
can count on me to help them fight the right battles.”
6 ©2017 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved www.AFPonline.org
Presentation Delivery
Personal and technical delivery are both equally important
and can be the differentiators between an effective
presentation and one that has your audience’s minds
wandering. How do you present yourself? Are you delivering
right information, to the right person, and in the right
format? These are questions every practitioner should ask
themselves before presenting.
FP&A must understand that every group is composed of
individuals, not homogenous groups. Therefore, you can’t
communicate with each of them in the same way. “There’s
a little bit of homework that needs to be done with each of
the groups that you’re interacting with,” Garin said. “The
same information coming out of different groups may
need to be communicated back in different ways within
the same company. I try to personally build a relationship
with the team that I’ll be working with, and make it clear
to them that we share common interests. I make it clear
that I’m not just demanding this information from them
or reporting results that they need to go back and do some-
thing with on their own.”
It can also help to change the template to keep presen-
tations from feeling stale and routine. Chopra’s team has
an internal mandate that at least once a year, it revisits its
presentation style and makes adjustments. “The reality is,
not everything works for everyone,” he said. “Sometimes,
the visuals work, and sometimes they don’t and you need
some type of explanation.”
Added Garin, “our leadership team likes some form of a
visual aid. They want to look at a medium level of detail,
 AFP GUIDE: How FP&A Can Develop Effective Presentations
but you don’t want to get into every detail and give them
too much information. So you need to know your audi-
ence and you need to tailor your individual presentation
or discussion around that.”
FP&A professionals can now create
infographics and storybooks to
assist in presentations. These
visualizations often are interactive
and can be “drilled into” to show
additional levels of data.
Leveraging technology
Advances in technology allow FP&A professionals to in-
clude greater data visualization and analysis in meetings.
The opportunity to leverage centralized, connected data
sets should reduce time spent gathering and normalizing
data, and predefined templates expedite the production of
standard reports, especially for the operational reviews.
Within the context of standard reporting is a common
feature called XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting
Language) tagging. This allows documents to be written
in a way that data elements can be inserted into the text
from an identified repository, and refreshed as needed
without manual assistance.
FP&A professionals can now create infographics and
storybooks to assist in presentations. These visualizations
often are interactive and can be “drilled into” to show addi-
tional levels of data. Lockhart has built a dynamic, financial
and operational dashboard that measures key performance
indicators across the company, utilizing live datasets. It also
has forecasting capabilities. “The dynamic aspect comes be-
cause I have created features where we can switch between
an organizational view to one of several divisional views,
and each of the charts updates accordingly,” he said. “In
addition, I’ve added the ability for prior-year lines, as well
as forecast lines to be added or removed from the visual
with the click of a button. This is something we use in the
revenue and cost management meeting series.”
By moving to dynamic reports, it may be time to ditch
the presentation binders altogether and bring interactive
reports to the meeting. How many times have you sat in
www.AFPonline.org ©2017 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved 7
a meeting with your audience flipping to different pages
of a briefing book or stapled packet, or asking about for-
mulas and assumptions that cannot be found anywhere on
a printed page? In a data-centric world, dynamic reports
allow you to have all your data in the meeting and probe
deeper into the analysis with the team.
Lockhart brings the dashboard up during the revenue
and cost management meetings and runs through it,
toggling through the divisions, scrolling through the
charts, and more. “It’s also brought up onscreen during
the COO’s monthly meeting to all of leadership, as well
as during board presentations by the COO and CEO—
though it’s spoke to at a high-level during each of those
meetings, not using the dynamic aspects,” he said.
One final way to leverage technology is to simply stop
printing documents for meetings. Going paperless doesn’t
just save money; it creates opportunities for collaboration.
If attendees are able to pull the data up on their laptop or
tablet, they will get a clearer picture than they would have
with a binder. Some of them may then begin performing
their own analyses and drawing new conclusions. Lapidus
advised that FP&A professionals need to be open to this
new kind of information sharing and incorporate the best
ideas into the meeting.
These are challenges that can only be resolved by a
change in culture. FP&A will need to begin approach-
ing presentations in a new way—one that is built around
making broader datasets available during the meeting.
Delivering bad news
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of delivering a presen-
tation, be it to the business units or to senior leadership,
is presenting bad news. You may need to discuss a missed
plan, a budget reduction, or the need to reallocate money
from one department to another—which may be no fault
of the department. You may even need to recommend
staffing cuts or canceling certain projects.
“There’s a certain tact required and a certain business
acumen that, if executed correctly, can make those hard
discussions go a lot better than they otherwise would,”
Garin said. “You’re essentially telling parties on both sides
things that they don’t want to hear.”
The tactics for delivering bad news vary. Muhr makes
sure that no bad news hits anyone out of the blue. “If it’s
news that is only relative up at the top level, before I pres-
ent it, I usually end up speaking to some of the audience
members up front—particularly the ones who are likely
AFP GUIDE: Building an Integrated Business Planning Capability

to have more detailed questions,” he said. “It’s almost like

greasing the skids. You’re saying, ‘Here’s what’s coming; if you
Key Takeaways:
want to talk about this prior to presenting, let’s do it.”
Similarly, when Muhr has to deliver bad news to a particular • In a world awash in data, insight
business line, he tries to hold conversations with people in that is at a premium. FP&A should
unit. “I’ll talk to the business line and make sure they’re seeing
deliver insight first, backed by
the same thing on their side—see if they analyze anything or
data and analysis.
have a view as to what’s occurring or what their recovery plan
is going to be before communicating that upward,” he said. • FP&A must speak the languages
“Because generally, when it’s bad news, there are generally of the business units while
more questions than when it’s good news. And I’d like to be as delivering details in operational
prepared as possible when it comes to that second and third-
performance reviews.
level type of question that’s going to follow when you deliver
that news.” • Performance reviews are an
Caprais’ team tries to accentuate the positive. “When we opportunity to build relation-
have to deliver negative news, we also highlight something ships with the business units.
that works well,” he said. “It is challenging because it may be
a business unit that isn’t doing that great and there might not • FP&A should see its role as
be much that stands out. But I think that it’s pretty effective to helping to allocate resources to
say, ‘This has worked and it’s good, and we also need to focus their most productive uses
on the things that need to improve.’ From there, you launch a across the organization.
corrective action and make sure that everybody is aligned on
implementing that.” • When presenting to senior
FP&A may also find itself in a situation in which everything leadership, FP&A professionals
is working fairly well, but it observes a storm brewing on the need to demonstrate executive
horizon. “That’s a completely different situation,” Caprais said. presence.
“So what we try to do is keep the business in a state of ‘healthy
paranoia’, which means that even though we’re doing well, you • If you are unable to answer a
never know what tomorrow may bring. So we try to be mindful question from an audience
of the things that we may be missing. That yields a lot of positive member, be sure to at least
results because it allows us to be proactive.” explain your reasoning for the
Most importantly, FP&A cannot try to squirm out of conclusions you’ve made and
delivering bad news, especially to executives. “That will destroy follow up on the question.
executive presence and credibility. Be honest, direct, and have
explanations at the ready and ideas for action in your back • Don’t avoid delivering bad
pocket,” Lapidus said. news. Try not to surprise your
audience and, when possible,
Communication Matters present a potential solution.
According to research by the Carnegie Institute of Technology,
85 percent of one’s financial success is their ability to commu- • Keeping the entire business in a
nicate. Presenting to the business units and senior leadership state of ‘healthy paranoia’ helps
are two opportunities to excel in communication. Whoever make everyone wary of the
the audience, it is imperative that FP&A professionals convey things that they may be missing,
their message in a way that they can comprehend, while also even when the organization is
being prepared and detailed enough that there is no doubt that doing well overall.
FP&A is the authority on the insight that is being delivered.

8 ©2017 Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. All Rights Reserved www.AFPonline.org
About the Author
Andrew Deichler is the editorial manager for the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP).
He produces content for a number of media outlets, including AFP Exchange, Inside Treasury, and
Treasury & Finance Week. Deichler regularly reports on a variety of complex topics, including
payments fraud, emerging technologies and financial regulation.

About AFP®
The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) is the professional society committed to advancing
the success of its members and their organizations. AFP established and administers the Certified
Treasury Professional and Certified Corporate FP&A Professional credentials, which set standards
of excellence in finance. Each year, AFP hosts the largest networking conference worldwide for over
6,500 corporate finance professionals.

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